"WITTY, ENERGETIC . . . It’s deeply satisfying to read a work of fictionso informed about its subject and so alive to every nuance and detail .. . [Smiley’s] final chapters have a wonderful restorative quality."–The New York Times Book Review

"WITTY, ENERGETIC . . . It’s deeply satisfying to read a work of fictionso informed about its subject and so alive to every nuance and detail .. . [Smiley’s] final chapters have a wonderful restorative quality."–The New York Times Book Review

Awards

Orange Prize for FictionNOMINEE 2001

About Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, Some Luck and Early Warning, the first volumes of The Last Hundred Years trilogy. She is also the author… More about Jane Smiley

About Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, Some Luck and Early Warning, the first volumes of The Last Hundred Years trilogy. She is also the author… More about Jane Smiley

Author Q&A

A Conversation with Jane Smiley

Ron Fletcher teaches English at Boston College High School inMassachusetts. His reviews and interviews have appeared in The ChristianScience Monitor, The Boston Phoenix, and The Boston Book Review. He isworking on his first novel. Years ago Ron was thrown from a nag.

RF:Your recent novels seem to fill an ever-broadening canvas, evokingthe heyday of the novel with their ambition and scope, myriadcharacters, and colorful incidents. Have you deliberately widened thefocus of your fiction?

JS: Well, it’s not too deliberate. This sort of work was prefigured inThe Greenlanders, a novel I wrote in the early eighties; it is longerthan Horse Heaven and presents more characters.

Often the subject determines the shape of the novel. In taking up ageneralized sport such as horse racing, I recognized that I’d have to beprepared to move around the world and into and out of the lives of manydifferent types of people. I needed a very broad canvas in order to geteven the tiniest flavor of that world down. So, the novel’s breadth wasa requirement of the material.

RF: How did you handle the challenge of organizing and structuring somuch material? Did you glimpse a whole from the outset, or did you writeyour way into the shape of things?

JS: The whole that I glimpsed from the beginning was much larger thanthe finished novel. I began earlier in the horses’ lives and coveredmuch more time. I knew, however, from the start that there were going tobe six horses, and I knew I would follow these six horses as their pathswound around the lives of various human characters. From my point ofview, the organizational problem wasn’t tremendously difficult. I justhad to keep my eye on the horses and know their whereabouts and company.For the reader who is new to this world, though, the organizationalsystem might seem a little strange. I often say to people, Remember whothe horses are and everything will fall into place.

RF: You introduce Horse Heaven as a "comic epic poem in prose."

JS: That’s a quote from Henry Fielding–from Joseph Andrews, I believe. First of all, horse racing started during Fielding’s time. Thus, the novel as a genre shares its beginning with that of horse racing. That seemed tome like a fun coincidence to present. And the idea of a "comic epic poem in prose"captured my intention: I wanted Horse Heaven to have different kinds ofstories in it, without being a straight comedy or tragedy. I hadenvisioned all of these interwoven stories that went in many differentdirections. The Fielding allusion seemed like a good way to kill twobirds with one stone; to suggest the original way that authors looked atthe novels they were writing, and to indicate the possibility of manytones and tales in one work.

RF: Although you present a world with which many are unfamiliar, youseem to respect your reader’s ability to make sense of the novel–doubleentendre intended.

JS: That’s true. There’s always the issue of how much to tell. Trying todefine every technical term or unfamiliar phrase in the course of thenarrative would result in a very humdrum, pedantic work. I figured thatfor good readers the weight of detail will eventually make its mark andthey’ll figure out what they need to know.

A number of readers have told me that they’ve read the book two or threetimes. I appreciate that, particularly since Horse Heaven is not amystery–there’s no big secret or single, explanatory dramatic moment. Ittells many different stories. It’s a book that allows one to not keepthings exactly straight the first time they read it and, I hope, invitesa second or third reading.

JS: There are a lot of novels we read and have no idea what the authoris talking about, yet, we find them compelling. Most of us read, say,Great Expectations when we’re in the eighth grade. How much of it makesany sense to us? But we keep reading it, and pretty soon we like it.

There’s no reason for a modern author not to go down that road. Acertain number of readers will follow a writer anywhere, because of theconcept of the willing suspension of disbelief. If you make the storyinteresting enough, someone will suspend disbelief no matter how strangeor unrecognizable the described places and lives are.

I had this problem in spades when I wrote The Greenlanders. I was usinga strange language to talk about a very strange world. The novel wasreally, really long and all the people essentially had the same lastname. Nonetheless, The Greenlanders has never been out-of-print.There’s always somebody in the audience who says it’s his or herfavorite novel. If the story’s there, a reader will follow. Any novelthat is set in an arcane world is going to present problems to itsauthor. You can piddle around, trying to solve them in some pedanticway, or you can just have faith in the reader and go for it.

RF: In many ways Horse Heaven presents a meditation on language: thereach and limits of words; the eloquence of gesture, silence, and otherwordless expressions. How did writing the novel change or challenge yourregard for the written word?

JS: I don’t think the written word is limited. The power of figurativelanguage remains unexplored. I don’t belong to the school of writers whosay, If only I had another tool. The tool that we have is plentypowerful. I’ve had a lot of experiences in the last three or four yearsthat indicate to me that there are all different kinds of communicationbetween creatures. All of them, nonetheless, can be captured in somekind of language if the writer is pre-cise enough. So far, I don’tbelieve that any experience lies beyond lan-guage. Those who saysomething is indescribable have chosen not to describe it.

RF: What is the reader’s role in all of this?

JS: It’s primary. If the reader feels that the thing described orcharacterized is satisfyingly expressed, then the author’s opinion aboutwhether she really did convey what was in her mind is of no consequence.When I’m reading To the Lighthouse, which really tries hard to describestuff that had never been described before, I come away from it with afeeling of revelation. And if I come away from it with that feeling,then Virginia Woolf’s views on whether or not she succeeded areimmaterial.RF: Like The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, HorseHeaven holds a mirror up to American culture to grapple with the issueof an American identity. The reflection, as in your previous novel, isrevealing but not always flattering.

JS: I have a naturally skeptical view of American culture; sometimes I’mskeptical but happy enough, and other times I’m skeptical and enraged.A number of my ancestors have been in America since the earlyseventeenth century and others since the early eighteenth century. Myfamily history is very much entwined in the ups and downs of Americanculture. The side of my family that resided in the northern states wasmade up of strict abolitionists; they certainly engaged in a critique ofculture in their day. And though my family is not overtly political,we’ve always discussed what it means to be a mainstream American. We’renot the elite, George Bush type; we’re the Bill Clinton type. (Half myfamily would die in their tracks if they heard me say that.) Myexperience has taught me that people who feel at home in a certainculture are always quarreling with it. We’ve always had plenty to sayabout how it ought to be but isn’t, and that tradi-tion does surface inmy novels.RF: The racetrack in Horse Heaven functions as a microcosm of democracyand capitalism, and we have there the inevitable conflict between thehaves and the have-nots, the privileged and the aspiring.

JS: The track is probably the most concentrated and diverse capitalistspace in any city. There, people from all sorts of ethnic,socioeconomic, educational, and cultural backgrounds are throwntogether. And despite all that diversity, everybody thinks about thesame two things: money and horses. There’s a constant shifting ofbalance between an interest in money and an interest in horses. Likeevery continuum, there’s the pure horse person at one end–one whodoesn’t care if he’s eating beans cooked on a hot-plate as long as he’snext to his horse. And there’s the pure money person who has neverlooked at an actual horse race, who has only looked at the racing formand the simulcast, despite the fact that the horses are right outsidethe door.RF: What did this breakdown offer you as a novelist?

JS: Two things: pure cynicism and pure mystery. You have purecalculation on one hand, with the constant figuring of odds, and puremystery on the other, with the indeterminate role of chance. Both cometogether– boom–in a big collision, a collision that is pretty muchunmediated by anything else, an individualized collision.

At the track, there’s no sense of being on a team, there’s no sense ofhaving your allegiance to a group. You’re a pure individual surroundedby pure individuals responding to a horse who is a pure individual.That’s another sense in which the track is the ultimate capitalistspace. It’s where individualism is the only form of human expression;there’s no collective form of human expression at the racetrack.

RF: There also seems to be an undercurrent of existentialism or, somemight say, spiritual groping: that which exists in the wake of a futileattempt to quantify or explain mystery. We also have the enduringstruggle between fate and fortuity.

JS: At the racetrack you’re always in the presence of the ineffable,which some people prefer to call luck. The expression used in racing fora horse that nobody thought could win but comes from far behind to doso is "He came from the clouds." And what else comes from the clouds?Revelation. Grace. There’s always this sense of the ineffable at theracetrack, a feeling that can reveal itself as mystery or as somethingmore sinister and dangerous.

As soon as individuals are gathered in one place and act as individualsrather than a group, the layers of unknowability begin to proliferate.All the factors that you might want to take into consideration cannot betaken into consideration. Finally, you take a leap of faith and land inthe presence of the ineffable. People respond differently to thisexperience; some try to systematize it, others try to ritualize it, anda few just enjoy it, seeing it as a form of mystery that cannot beplumbed, only received.RF: It sounds like you belong to the last group.

JS: Spending time with horses teaches you to experience the momentfully. Every moment you have with a horse is intense yet fleeting.Horses are inherently changeable. As a prey animal, a horse’sinstincts–in the name of self-preservation–always say "flight." He’sacutely aware of his environment, easily scared, and easily distracted.If you want a horse to do a particular thing, you have to habituate the horse moment by moment. This patient, deliberate approach is required for getting the horse to do something as simple as walking a straight line, which doesn’t come naturally to him. So every moment with every horse is full but fleeting. People who love horses have some kind of relationship to the fleeting quality of life. Either they love horses in spite of it or they lovehorses and appreciate that.

RF: With Horse Heaven you had an opportunity to marry your two chiefpassions, writing and horses. What happens now?

JS: Well, I have a horse at the racetrack, a yearling who is ready to goto the training farm, and three weanlings that look like really goodprospects. So life among the horses continues. They, like writing, are acentral part of my life, and I think about them often. I don’t foreseedoing a sequel to Horse Heaven. The horses have all been taken careof–in one way or another. What I’d love to do is a televi-sion seriesabout life at the racetrack. I think it would be wonderful.

I’m so deeply involved with horses every day. I did several horserelated things today. There are plenty of times, though, when I think,Gee, this is costing me so much money–what’s the payoff? Then I go outand the horse does some mildly idiosyncratic thing that I absolutelylove. There’s the payoff. If I’d ask myself how much that fleetingmoment cost me, I’d probably keel over. If we questioned the cost ofhaving children or being in love or building a house–doing anything thatmakes us happy–then we’d never do anything.RF: It seems as though the line between horse and human in your novel iseven more blurred in your day-to-day experience.

JS: I prefer to think of it like this: Everybody is essentially aspiritual being who is temporarily settled in a horse or a human or adog–whatever. Our essential communication with another being is aspiritual communication, which is filtered through one body to anotherdespite differences in shape or form.

With a horse, for example, there’s a connection that takes place on avery arcane, spiritual level–not in the realm of motions or actions orintentions. We meet in the realm of attention. The job of thehorse-trainer or lover or parent or novelist is to remove the variousobstacles to spiritual connection in order to meet the other being inthe realm of true attention.

A Conversation with Jane Smiley

Ron Fletcher teaches English at Boston College High School inMassachusetts. His reviews and interviews have appeared in The ChristianScience Monitor, The Boston Phoenix, and The Boston Book Review. He isworking on his first novel. Years ago Ron was thrown from a nag.

RF:Your recent novels seem to fill an ever-broadening canvas, evokingthe heyday of the novel with their ambition and scope, myriadcharacters, and colorful incidents. Have you deliberately widened thefocus of your fiction?

JS: Well, it’s not too deliberate. This sort of work was prefigured inThe Greenlanders, a novel I wrote in the early eighties; it is longerthan Horse Heaven and presents more characters.

Often the subject determines the shape of the novel. In taking up ageneralized sport such as horse racing, I recognized that I’d have to beprepared to move around the world and into and out of the lives of manydifferent types of people. I needed a very broad canvas in order to geteven the tiniest flavor of that world down. So, the novel’s breadth wasa requirement of the material.

RF: How did you handle the challenge of organizing and structuring somuch material? Did you glimpse a whole from the outset, or did you writeyour way into the shape of things?

JS: The whole that I glimpsed from the beginning was much larger thanthe finished novel. I began earlier in the horses’ lives and coveredmuch more time. I knew, however, from the start that there were going tobe six horses, and I knew I would follow these six horses as their pathswound around the lives of various human characters. From my point ofview, the organizational problem wasn’t tremendously difficult. I justhad to keep my eye on the horses and know their whereabouts and company.For the reader who is new to this world, though, the organizationalsystem might seem a little strange. I often say to people, Remember whothe horses are and everything will fall into place.

RF: You introduce Horse Heaven as a "comic epic poem in prose."

JS: That’s a quote from Henry Fielding–from Joseph Andrews, I believe. First of all, horse racing started during Fielding’s time. Thus, the novel as a genre shares its beginning with that of horse racing. That seemed tome like a fun coincidence to present. And the idea of a "comic epic poem in prose"captured my intention: I wanted Horse Heaven to have different kinds ofstories in it, without being a straight comedy or tragedy. I hadenvisioned all of these interwoven stories that went in many differentdirections. The Fielding allusion seemed like a good way to kill twobirds with one stone; to suggest the original way that authors looked atthe novels they were writing, and to indicate the possibility of manytones and tales in one work.

RF: Although you present a world with which many are unfamiliar, youseem to respect your reader’s ability to make sense of the novel–doubleentendre intended.

JS: That’s true. There’s always the issue of how much to tell. Trying todefine every technical term or unfamiliar phrase in the course of thenarrative would result in a very humdrum, pedantic work. I figured thatfor good readers the weight of detail will eventually make its mark andthey’ll figure out what they need to know.

A number of readers have told me that they’ve read the book two or threetimes. I appreciate that, particularly since Horse Heaven is not amystery–there’s no big secret or single, explanatory dramatic moment. Ittells many different stories. It’s a book that allows one to not keepthings exactly straight the first time they read it and, I hope, invitesa second or third reading.

JS: There are a lot of novels we read and have no idea what the authoris talking about, yet, we find them compelling. Most of us read, say,Great Expectations when we’re in the eighth grade. How much of it makesany sense to us? But we keep reading it, and pretty soon we like it.

There’s no reason for a modern author not to go down that road. Acertain number of readers will follow a writer anywhere, because of theconcept of the willing suspension of disbelief. If you make the storyinteresting enough, someone will suspend disbelief no matter how strangeor unrecognizable the described places and lives are.

I had this problem in spades when I wrote The Greenlanders. I was usinga strange language to talk about a very strange world. The novel wasreally, really long and all the people essentially had the same lastname. Nonetheless, The Greenlanders has never been out-of-print.There’s always somebody in the audience who says it’s his or herfavorite novel. If the story’s there, a reader will follow. Any novelthat is set in an arcane world is going to present problems to itsauthor. You can piddle around, trying to solve them in some pedanticway, or you can just have faith in the reader and go for it.

RF: In many ways Horse Heaven presents a meditation on language: thereach and limits of words; the eloquence of gesture, silence, and otherwordless expressions. How did writing the novel change or challenge yourregard for the written word?

JS: I don’t think the written word is limited. The power of figurativelanguage remains unexplored. I don’t belong to the school of writers whosay, If only I had another tool. The tool that we have is plentypowerful. I’ve had a lot of experiences in the last three or four yearsthat indicate to me that there are all different kinds of communicationbetween creatures. All of them, nonetheless, can be captured in somekind of language if the writer is pre-cise enough. So far, I don’tbelieve that any experience lies beyond lan-guage. Those who saysomething is indescribable have chosen not to describe it.

RF: What is the reader’s role in all of this?

JS: It’s primary. If the reader feels that the thing described orcharacterized is satisfyingly expressed, then the author’s opinion aboutwhether she really did convey what was in her mind is of no consequence.When I’m reading To the Lighthouse, which really tries hard to describestuff that had never been described before, I come away from it with afeeling of revelation. And if I come away from it with that feeling,then Virginia Woolf’s views on whether or not she succeeded areimmaterial.RF: Like The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, HorseHeaven holds a mirror up to American culture to grapple with the issueof an American identity. The reflection, as in your previous novel, isrevealing but not always flattering.

JS: I have a naturally skeptical view of American culture; sometimes I’mskeptical but happy enough, and other times I’m skeptical and enraged.A number of my ancestors have been in America since the earlyseventeenth century and others since the early eighteenth century. Myfamily history is very much entwined in the ups and downs of Americanculture. The side of my family that resided in the northern states wasmade up of strict abolitionists; they certainly engaged in a critique ofculture in their day. And though my family is not overtly political,we’ve always discussed what it means to be a mainstream American. We’renot the elite, George Bush type; we’re the Bill Clinton type. (Half myfamily would die in their tracks if they heard me say that.) Myexperience has taught me that people who feel at home in a certainculture are always quarreling with it. We’ve always had plenty to sayabout how it ought to be but isn’t, and that tradi-tion does surface inmy novels.RF: The racetrack in Horse Heaven functions as a microcosm of democracyand capitalism, and we have there the inevitable conflict between thehaves and the have-nots, the privileged and the aspiring.

JS: The track is probably the most concentrated and diverse capitalistspace in any city. There, people from all sorts of ethnic,socioeconomic, educational, and cultural backgrounds are throwntogether. And despite all that diversity, everybody thinks about thesame two things: money and horses. There’s a constant shifting ofbalance between an interest in money and an interest in horses. Likeevery continuum, there’s the pure horse person at one end–one whodoesn’t care if he’s eating beans cooked on a hot-plate as long as he’snext to his horse. And there’s the pure money person who has neverlooked at an actual horse race, who has only looked at the racing formand the simulcast, despite the fact that the horses are right outsidethe door.RF: What did this breakdown offer you as a novelist?

JS: Two things: pure cynicism and pure mystery. You have purecalculation on one hand, with the constant figuring of odds, and puremystery on the other, with the indeterminate role of chance. Both cometogether– boom–in a big collision, a collision that is pretty muchunmediated by anything else, an individualized collision.

At the track, there’s no sense of being on a team, there’s no sense ofhaving your allegiance to a group. You’re a pure individual surroundedby pure individuals responding to a horse who is a pure individual.That’s another sense in which the track is the ultimate capitalistspace. It’s where individualism is the only form of human expression;there’s no collective form of human expression at the racetrack.

RF: There also seems to be an undercurrent of existentialism or, somemight say, spiritual groping: that which exists in the wake of a futileattempt to quantify or explain mystery. We also have the enduringstruggle between fate and fortuity.

JS: At the racetrack you’re always in the presence of the ineffable,which some people prefer to call luck. The expression used in racing fora horse that nobody thought could win but comes from far behind to doso is "He came from the clouds." And what else comes from the clouds?Revelation. Grace. There’s always this sense of the ineffable at theracetrack, a feeling that can reveal itself as mystery or as somethingmore sinister and dangerous.

As soon as individuals are gathered in one place and act as individualsrather than a group, the layers of unknowability begin to proliferate.All the factors that you might want to take into consideration cannot betaken into consideration. Finally, you take a leap of faith and land inthe presence of the ineffable. People respond differently to thisexperience; some try to systematize it, others try to ritualize it, anda few just enjoy it, seeing it as a form of mystery that cannot beplumbed, only received.RF: It sounds like you belong to the last group.

JS: Spending time with horses teaches you to experience the momentfully. Every moment you have with a horse is intense yet fleeting.Horses are inherently changeable. As a prey animal, a horse’sinstincts–in the name of self-preservation–always say "flight." He’sacutely aware of his environment, easily scared, and easily distracted.If you want a horse to do a particular thing, you have to habituate the horse moment by moment. This patient, deliberate approach is required for getting the horse to do something as simple as walking a straight line, which doesn’t come naturally to him. So every moment with every horse is full but fleeting. People who love horses have some kind of relationship to the fleeting quality of life. Either they love horses in spite of it or they lovehorses and appreciate that.

RF: With Horse Heaven you had an opportunity to marry your two chiefpassions, writing and horses. What happens now?

JS: Well, I have a horse at the racetrack, a yearling who is ready to goto the training farm, and three weanlings that look like really goodprospects. So life among the horses continues. They, like writing, are acentral part of my life, and I think about them often. I don’t foreseedoing a sequel to Horse Heaven. The horses have all been taken careof–in one way or another. What I’d love to do is a televi-sion seriesabout life at the racetrack. I think it would be wonderful.

I’m so deeply involved with horses every day. I did several horserelated things today. There are plenty of times, though, when I think,Gee, this is costing me so much money–what’s the payoff? Then I go outand the horse does some mildly idiosyncratic thing that I absolutelylove. There’s the payoff. If I’d ask myself how much that fleetingmoment cost me, I’d probably keel over. If we questioned the cost ofhaving children or being in love or building a house–doing anything thatmakes us happy–then we’d never do anything.RF: It seems as though the line between horse and human in your novel iseven more blurred in your day-to-day experience.

JS: I prefer to think of it like this: Everybody is essentially aspiritual being who is temporarily settled in a horse or a human or adog–whatever. Our essential communication with another being is aspiritual communication, which is filtered through one body to anotherdespite differences in shape or form.

With a horse, for example, there’s a connection that takes place on avery arcane, spiritual level–not in the realm of motions or actions orintentions. We meet in the realm of attention. The job of thehorse-trainer or lover or parent or novelist is to remove the variousobstacles to spiritual connection in order to meet the other being inthe realm of true attention.